Hospitals take action to address alarm fatigue

Hospitals have been developing new safety procedures to address "alarm fatigue" in time for the Joint Commission's January 2016 deadline to do so, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal.

The problem--staff becoming desensitized to the bevy of alarms from patient-monitoring devices--regularly tops the ECRI Institute's list of patient safety hazards.

The Joint Commission made dealing with alarm fatigue a national patient safety goal in June 2013 and directed hospitals to create safety policies and education for staff around the issue.

"Culture is probably the hardest part of alarm management because staffers are used to doing things their own way," Rikin Shah, a senior consultant at the ECRI Institute, tells WSJ.

The article highlights research from the University of California San Francisco, which logged 2.5 million alarms in five UCSF adult intensive care units in 31 days. It found 88.8 percent of them were false alarms.

Among UCSF's solutions was adding a 20-second delay to an alarm from finger-clip monitors used to measure oxygen saturation, meaning the change had to persist for 20 seconds before it set off an alarm.